By Jill Colvin
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
MANHATTAN — Eighth graders are holding their breath as they begin to learn where they'll be spending the next four years of school.
The Department of Education sent out decision letters Thursday to 78,747 students who applied for admission to the city's regular public high schools. Students submit a list of up to 12 schools in order of where they'd like to go most.
Nearly half of the students earned admission to the schools they'd listed first on their lists, DOE numbers show. More than 80 percent were matched with one of their top five.
Still, more than 8,000 eighth graders across the city were rejected from every school to which they'd applied — a 23 percent increase from the 6,694 students who did not receive a match last year.
That leaves about 10 percent of students who will be forced to reapply to schools that still have space left over in a "supplementary" admissions round. The deadline for those applications is April 15.
Bronx resident Isaac Rodriguez said his son, eighth grader Joseph, called him on the verge of tears Thursday to say he hadn't been admitted to a single school he'd chosen, including options in Manhattan, Brooklyn and his top choice, the Bronx Center for Science and Mathematics.
"Man, I didn't get picked to any of my schools. No schools. Nobody picked me," Joseph fretted to his dad. "He was very frustrated," Rodriguez said.
The DOE attributed the rejection increase to the fact that the department included schools' graduation rates in its official high school directory for the first time this year. As a result, more students chose to apply to the same schools, driving their admission rates down.
Applications for school with graduation rates above 70 percent increased by 12 percent, while those with rates below 70 percent fell by 24 percent, DOE data show.
"What we see is that when families have more information, especially with regard to graduation rates, they naturally gravitate toward those better options for their kids," Deputy Schools Chancellor Marc Sternberg said in a statement.
But while many students received their letters at school on Thursday, others whose schools chose to send them out via mail were still awaiting their fates.
Susan Kramer, whose daughter, Rose, is an eighth grader at the Clinton School for Writers and Artists in Chelsea, was waiting anxiously for the mailman Friday to learn whether Rose had gained admission to Beacon High School on the Upper West Side, where her brother is now in eleventh grade.
The 1,150-seat school received 5,705 applications for admission this year, making it the fourth most sought-after high school in the city. Gramercy's Baruch College Campus High School was the most popular, with 7,606 applications, up 60 percent from last year.
"It's really hard," said Kramer of the admissions process, which she said many parents with older children have described as more stressful than getting kids into college.
Kramer said that before this year, students at Clinton received their verdicts at school instead of via mail, making for an emotional scene.
"Of course there's a lot of hysteria when kids get in," she said. "Everyone's just crying. It's just a terrible scene." This year, parents asked that letters be mailed home instead.
But the wait wasn't fun. "She's remaining optimistic that's she's going to get into her first choice," a nervous Kramer said.
Only minutes after hanging up the phone with DNAinfo, Kramer wrote back, thrilled.
"My daughter got in to Beacon! I'm so happy and relieved. Can't wait to tell her," she wrote. Others at the school weren't as lucky, she said.
For those students, the DOE will be hosting an informational fair on Tues. April 5 from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. at the Martin Luther King, Jr. Educational Campus at 122 Amsterdam Ave. Students who re-apply will receive their matches in late May, the DOE said.
The process for regular high schools is separate from applications for specialized schools, such as Stuyvesant High School and the Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, which took place earlier this year.
The deadline for applying to the city's charter schools is also today.
